UNDP in Ukraine

Cities running smarter with 2.0

18 Oct 2013

Lviv municipality will provide aid to citizens’ initiatives that the majority of other citizens support through electronic voting. Dolyna municipality will run its housing and public utilities with the help of 3D mapping. Every Vinnytsia citizen will have a personal Internet assistant. Parents in Novohrad-Volynskyi will communicate with school authorities and teachers online.

These are some of pilot projects that were prototyped during the three-day marathon on e-governance tools running in Odesa on 16-18 October. Representatives from Dolyna, Ivano-Frankivsk, Kyiv, Lviv, Novohrad-Volynskyi, Slavutych and Vinnytsia contributed. Each participating team was composed of a focal point for e-governance, a developer/IT specialist and civic activists.

“We hope that the teams will efficiently use 2.0 technologies for development of local policies and providing solutions to local problems. In other words, the old modality of relationships between community and authorities presuming that the latter creates products that the former are passively taking in or actively complaining upon is currently fading. New 2.0 modality of cooperation enables the authorities and communities as well as activists, developers and everyone who cares to effectively contribute to producing solutions to local problems,” stated Ricarda Rieger, UNDP Country Director in Ukraine.

A characteristic feature of the Lab was the on-going high-quality cooperation between local authorities, communities and IT specialists. En route to engaging citizens to develop plans and pilot projects, the teams were assisted by mentors from private, NGO and public sectors. However, the main attention was drawn to the development of cooperation between the community and authorities on producing common project visions rather than on specific technical solutions.

“Nowadays municipalities have to save resources. If local initiatives flounder, it may cost a lot. Citizens should feel that the authorities respect them as experts – actually, nobody knows the problems of overcrowded public transport better than a person who uses this transport every day to get to office,” added David Osimo, expert on e-governance and the European Commission adviser on e-governance.

The winner of the marathon was the team from Lviv. Its project aims to identify the most popular civic initiatives in the city. According to this idea, Lviv municipality will provide aid to citizens’ initiatives that the majority of other citizens would support through voting and would be ready to contribute to.

Runners-up are the teams from Dolyna and Novohrad-Volynskyi. Dolyna will implement a project on electronic engagement of citizens toward solving housing and public utilities problems through 3D mapping. Novohrad-Volynskyi will involve parents in school affairs through a portal that will enable parents to track the progress of study, communicate with teachers and form tutors, learn about regular schooling, circles and other extra-curricular activities.

Vinnytsia team was a winner of special partner nomination awarded by Microsoft Ukraine. It proposed to design a personal information point for every citizen, called iVin.

Other teams that won a special nomination from the other partner – DELL Ukraine – came from Ivano-Frankivsk (with an idea of making city tourism more informed and appealing through web-applications) and Kyiv (it proposed to develop “Babycard” – a unique service card for new parents).